Noel Borthwick

Agreed that these should be native functions. At some point we also intend to replace CAL with a modern scripting language. We're a small team and as you might imaging juggling two full DAW's has been a challenge the last few years

I havent seen this. Which menu are you clicking that results in this slow drawing?

@Morten Saether is working on several video's for Next. We also may do new videos on Sonar.

Quick grouping handles most of the commonly used operations like changing track or plugin parameters over multiple selected tracks. I see your request however.

I have a trunk full of full licenses ready. Only available on floppy disk ATM.

Thanks for your thoughtful reply and we are def interested in any workflow changes that enable more efficient production. You can check out Next today by signing up for the beta eval. In next there is also track bounce in place. Doing that in Sonar just requires choosing bounce to track with the same destination track but I hear your point about streamlining this. If I add bounce tracks in place to sonar will you buy it? ?

You are right about biases in the industry. It's not just with software, bias permeates the entire music industry! I'm sure you have seen Mac bias where not having a Mac version is deemed inferior or less professional. Hopefully us having a MacOS DAW now (Cakewalk Next) will alleviate that. CbB being free also was an issue with some vendors who don't test with "free daws" ?

Mark with all due respect, you have quoted a bunch of features rather than workflow deficiencies. While some of these might be on our future roadmap, over the last 5 years we have favored stability and workflow improvements as well as refining features we already have, over adding a bunch of half-baked features to compete with other DAW's. Cakewalk is already very feature rich and benefits more from this approach. Look at the improvements to export or tempo management as just a couple of examples. I'd also point out that Cakewalk has several other features that other DAW's lack or are only just catching up to. Every user is going to find something lacking in any given DAW at any time, so its in their best interest to find one that satisfies most of their needs, or use multiple DAW's BTW Bounce render in place is already available in Cakewalk. I'm not sure what you mean by remote control but it's been available for decades. Re: Sampler our new product Cakewalk Next has an integrated sampler. Its cross-platform code, so you may see that in Sonar someday soon.

No, he's not regurgitating "old lines". He's giving you a reasonable explanation of why plugin crashes occur, but you are not prepared to listen to a reasonable explanation. We have no interest in being defensive about crashes and fix any issues in our software promptly as many will attest. (that are actually ours) Read this article which explains why plugin crashes occur and how to diagnose them. 99% of plugin crashes occur because the vendor has not tested them with all the combinations of operations that occur in a DAW. Also many of the smaller vendors tend to test their plugins in their favorite DAW and call it a day. Another common thing I've seen over the years is that some vendors only test in Mac DAW's so completely skip Cakewalk. The advice in the article I posted is the best way to get a resolution, if you must use a plugin that crashes. If you send us the dump we can sometimes pinpoint the crash and follow up with the vendor but most of the time only the vendor can solve it, and it is indeed the vendor's responsibilty to investigate first and contact us later if they actually claim its an issue with the host. Cakewalk has been around more than 30 years and our VST infrastructure is very stable (even Steinberg has commented about this)

I totally remember that!

That feature is only in the new version of Sonar

Right here in Cakewalk. Press that button.

What would the world be without panic. We all need some

Chris, Cakewalk is a division of BandLab Technologies and a corporate decision was made to have us operate independently under our own brand. We are now a multi-product company and have two products Sonar and Next with more to come in the future. Calling the product Cakewalk wouldn't make much sense. Cakewalk by Cakewalk? Lol Also, there were numerous cases in the past where BandLab users were confused with the old branding and thought CbB was the BandLab web DAW (which they have now renamed to BandLab Studio). The new branding will alleviate issues like that.

Refer to my post. Do you really think we haven't considered people not running 4K displays? Why waste your time speculating on what you havent seen yet.

Thanks @Cyanide Lovesong. We have the ability to turn on/off DPI scaling at the app level and also at the individual plugin level so it's all backwards compatible. See below. Also, to the naysayers, we have decades of experience writing Windows software and worked directly with Microsoft engineers with some of this DPI stuff over the years. Rest assured we know what we're doing, probably more than most others in our industry at least for Windows! So far we haven't had any performance issues issues, but as you say dynamically baking bitmaps is a fallback that we discussed a long time ago if it was ever necessary to do.

All the DPI awareness work done was for the Sonar application. Cakewalk Next is already vector based. Cakewalk Sonar is a hybrid DPI aware application. Plugin's need to be independently made DPI aware for them to be scalable. By default, Sonar assumes that plugins are DPI aware and if there are scaling problems noted it can be disabled on a per plugin basis. There is a new "Enhanced Display Scaling" option in the plugin properties settings to control this. However only a few Cakewalk plugins are fully DPI aware - for example the prochannel modules. For the others you may have to disable the per plugin "Enhanced Display Scaling" for them to work. When Enhanced Display Scaling is off we rely on Windows to handle the scaling when running high dpi monitors. In the future we may update some cakewalk plugins to also be DPI aware like we're doing with Sonar but it's not on the roadmap ATM. IOW High DPI support is not available across the board for all plugins. It depends on the specific plugin.

Um no where did you read Sonar mac in what I wrote. Sonar will not be ported to Mac. Cakewalk's Mac solution going forward will be Next. Going forward its just Cakewalk Sonar and Cakewalk Next exclusively.

It already is :-P

Guys I think there is some disconnect about what Sonar is. We aren't changing the core Sonar code from what Cbb is so its not changing the user interface. You can think of it as exactly the same as what you are using but with some new features. i.e. treat it similar to a major point upgrade over CbB. The UI will look nicer and be more modern as well.

backwoods I suggest you contact BandLab support. I don't really have access to all that data. If you have a migrated SSO account they may be able to help you. Old unmigrated accounts are a different story.

Next beta has been active for several months in internal beta. We're now opening it up for limited public access. People who signed up should gradually get invites. We need to load balance it so we aren't overwhelmed initially...

Next is a completely new DAW designed from the ground up by us over the last five years. It was developed to be cross platform and works equally well on Mac and PC with full AU and VST support. The focus so far has been on creation centric features as opposed to the more production centric features that Sonar has. For example, it has very intuitive lyrics entry and song arrangements, a built in sampler and pad controller which is quite powerful, allowing you to set up sampler or instrument pads. While Next might look visually similar to the online web based BandLab Studio that's only because we followed branding guidelines. It has full integration with the BandLab ecosystem with integrated browsing of BandLab loops as well as upload and download to the BandLab library. The product itself is quite deep and includes many of the bells and whistles Cakewalk users have come to expect, like multiprocessor support, background plugin scanning and flexible routing. Routing is very simplified and elegant in Next and can all be done via track folders (unlike Sonar). There are many more exciting features coming in future roadmaps. I'm sure in the upcoming weeks Jesse will post more information about Next. In the interim, interested users are welcome to request beta access if you want hands-on experience with the application.

Cakewalk as a company closed in 2018. My question to you is can you still use SONAR Platinum today? If the answer is yes, then you have your answer for the future. Most ethical companies handle terminating events like that gracefully and we are no exception. When Cakewalk was shut down, we had escrow plans to unlock licenses for users permanently if it came to that. We never needed to, since BandLab acquired the software and keeps the license servers running even though we make no profit off of it.

My car is already subscription (OnStar). If I want remote access to it or to check stats, I have to pay $15 a month I got a few years of free access when I bought it. Actual appliances have already gone this way. The classic 90's software model of paying for a specific version has changed many years ago whether we like it or not. As I mentioned in another thread, back in the day we had a hybrid model where you could do either pay as you go or buy that years version outright. It worked pretty well and satisfied most users needs. While we haven't baked the final details I think Cakewalk's offering will be a pretty compelling value even compared to other DAW's. Obviously not free...